The dark side of video collaboration

Being the primary point of contact to the outside world for all things video conferencing, I encounter a lot of people using a lot of tools, this week was a rather eye opening experience for me. We were asked to bridge an event being hosted at another institution because their new polycom stuff did not seem to want to connect to anything and on top of that, the site they were connecting with required some obscure dialing method. In my 15+ years of doing this, I have never seen a dialing string that looked like the following “#@IP@extention#passcode#” (needless to say, that didnt work!). In the end the only thing that worked was the easiest method, Lifesize Cloud. I was also introduced to the Zoom Room Connector feature this week; seriously...has anyone seen a zoom invite with H.323 instructions? It was 3 pages long and had about 10 IP addresses based on what part of the world I was living in, complete with an ip for eastern and western US (common man!). I encounter a lot of Zoom users in my travels, I met one today after inviting them to a Lifesize Cloud call and they told me that lifesize was much better and asked me where he could purchase it. If anything materializes from that, I want a cut of the commission Lol!!

For as much as I complain about things lifesize needs to improve on, using something that just works makes me forget that there really is a dark side to video collaboration.

This is so awesome, thanks for this Jon! Really brings home a lot of the ideas and strategies we have in place as a company which always end up at "Make it simple".

The dial string was probably e.164@IP##passcode which is based on the old PSTN ITU standards established in May of 1997, truly old school stuff. I am always a little shocked to hear that people still use these methods as their main dialing method. To be completely honest we support these methods on our solution as well, as a full video collaboration platform we have to, however, it is not the prefered method as you know.

I remember the e.164 days, we were paired with the I2 gatekeeper for years but never really utilized it. It could have been that but i'm guessing they were behind some sort of border controller whatever it was, they sure didn't know how to let people connect to them properly. They were able to connect with us in 5 minute spurts when their firewall gracefully kicked them out of the call. I ended up finding the nearest pile of coats to hide under and this user was "secretly" given a guest invite to join a browser based call instead. This type of stuff is exactly why people like me get asked, why don't we just use skype? We heard that question quite regularly before we started offering a browser based option. Now people get it and usage has taken off, they still call it Skyping which annoys me but we are in a good place.

Thank you kindly for sharing this! You've always been an awesome advocate for us and I can't thank you enough for always being open and honest with your feedback. It's customers like you who help us to understand what's working well and where we have opportunities to get better. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for always sharing with us and others. It's important to us because it's important to you I'm sure you know that. Also a huge shout out to you for the LinkedIn mention a few weeks ago. That was super kind of you!

I see this quite often, it really is a case of two very separated worlds of video communication. The positive side is that more and more people participates in meetings in modern platforms and realize that it actually can be easy and then can push for change within their respective organizations. However, even with services like LS Cloud I still see organizations making it hard for themselves and others by using e.g. white listing IP's and so forth, not really understanding that they've transitioned from something very firewall-unfriendly to something that isn't more dramatic than 'normal' web usage. Funny also, that organizations can be hesitant towards services like LS Cloud as a cloud solution, but doesn't reflect for a second about their own S4B subscription in the cloud...

The best way to push forward, imho, is to continue to expose LS Cloud to more and more users so they understand that video can be quite hazzle free

Jon, great story! The fact that its true makes it even better. I especially like the part about the "Zoom Room connector instructions". I wanted to join a Zoom meeting I was invited to from my Icon 600 and I realized that the host did not HAVE that option- so my only choice would have been to use my laptop/webcam versus my nice integrated conference room set up we built out... so I asked THEM if they would mind calling my Cloud room instead (they did).. Yes, I know, selfish of me but it worked, which I knew it would!!!

Zoom room connector is needed by host or participant, if you want to connect to zoom room with H.323/SIP endpoint and this option is not as cheap as should be (€46.00/mo/port list price). Any additional options you need to extra pay is not really used for majority of users and is making problems. Many years ago H.239/BFCP/DualVideo was such option, or "Dual display" for connecting to 2 monitors, or ... you can still see this, 1080p licence option. This is killing videoconference user experience.

In last years I see Zoom is more and more popular by educational organisation. It is not perfect, but some features are very interresting and Zoom is cheap, especially for educational users. Anyone can use Zoom also for free, like Skype.

It seems like Zoom is going to be "another Skype" ?

But, I don't really want to talk about zoom on lifesize blog. :-) I'm sure LifeSize staff is aware what is competion doing.

My comment on original post is, that we still need some "easy" way to connect H.323/SIP room systems to sometimes lifesizecloud.com, sometimes to zoom.us, sometimes to... and this is always confusing for enduser. Our endusers are not using only one "conference provider", because there are many international events/organisations/conferences and each videoconference organizer is using his preferred solution.

I still think, each conference room should use format like conferenceID@domain for H.323/SIP(/and mobile apps) systems and https URL for web browsers. All other options are too complicated (don't put "security pin" in dial-string, this is 0 security).

I can also say that videoconferences at lifesizecloud.com are working very good most of the time. If using non-LifeSize room system with 1080p support (and not registered at lifesizecloud) with this conference rooms, you can still see from time to time that video quallity could be better. There is always space for improvment.